Shakespeare’s
festive comedies – A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night – are bound within a
series of strict societal rules, rules which govern behaviours, moods, actions
and reactions, as well as language and plot. They also perform a very specific
function, namely allowing the society’s capacity for anarchy or misrule to find
a full expression in an environment where mischief-making can be corrected,
apologised for, and in some cases, released. Punning on the notion of ‘will’ – the
idea of desire and love (and/or lust), as much as autonomy, as well as being a
euphemism for penis – Shakespeare somehow manages to create a play which, like
Rosalind at the end of As You Like It,
asks us to cherish what pleases us and forgive the rest.
Eamon Flack’s As You Like It,
seen at Belvoir in 2011, took Shakespeare’s play and infused it with a wit,
warmth, and fullness of life and expression that barely seemed to be contained
within the two walls of the Belvoir stage, and later spilled over into the
street outside. In
creating that production, Flack and his collaborators “gave [themselves]
the same task Shakespeare gave himself and his company” – that is, to
(re)create the kind of experience that Shakespeare might have written to be
performed on Shrove Tuesday at Richmond
Palace
In his director’s
notes for Twelfth Night, Flack writes
about the holy days and feast days when controlled anarchy (such as pageants
and rough-theatre) was permitted. He also says that for Twelfth Night, he and his collaborators set themselves the task of
“performing the play almost entirely as written[,] partly as a boast and partly
as a warning, because some of the play is now archaic nonsense… [We] have taken
the play on its own terms and plunged headlong into its strange poetry because
the archaic oddity of the play is what makes it glorious.” Except that it’s
not. Not really. Not much at all.
